About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

28 September 2009

Virtual Goods 2009

This was my 3rd Virtual Goods Workshop, and my first as program chair. Without blowing my own horn too much, I think that although the number of papers in the workshop was not as high as I would have liked it to be, the quality of the papers was amazing.

The highlight for me was the keynote talk by Bill Rosenblatt, on the past, current and future of DRM. Like many in the DRM research community, it is well accepted that the biggest fundamental problem with DRM was not necessarily the technology, but the economics and the marketing that went in. More and more, DRM is being proposed as a means to enforce privacy legislation, one of the original use cases of DRM, that was overlooked in favour of pushing for a very small control set of copyright regulation enforcement. Bill Rosenblatt has been in the field of DRM for a long time, and the presentation was insightful on the many aspects that led to the current outlook on DRM.

Another interesting talk was Mario Kubek and Jürgen Nützel's paper on "Novel Interactive Music Search Techniques", which takes a number of different search techniques including text analysis, melody analysis, frequency analaysis and much more to derive the various genres that correspond to a musical item; and also look for similarities between musical pieces using sources such as Google and Wikipedia. It is certainly an interesting way for powering future media exploration.

Next year's Virtual Goods Workshop will take place in Namur, Belgium.

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